“I’m just . . . Halina?” he murmured, but there wasn’t enough blood in his brain to untangle that cryptic message.
Mitch pressed a hand to the wall, let his knees give, and groaned. With a few deep breaths of the cold night air, he was able to follow her into the office with painful steps and had the majority of his blood back in the right places by the time they reached the room.
After settling Dex on the bed with an order to stay, Halina escaped into the bathroom for a shower. Which was when all Mitch’s red blood cells started to scatter again.
He lay on the bed closest to the door propped up against the headboard with the hotel-supplied pad of paper on his lap, a hotel-supplied pencil in one hand, the other stroking Dex’s head while the dog lay next to him.
He had scribbled a flowchart on the tablet, connections between the new information Halina had provided so far. That was his proof that he wasn’t lying there thinking about her naked body beyond that door. Or imagining the way she would look with water sluicing over all those sleek muscles. Or remembering the last time they’d been in a shower together.
His groin grew tight again and Mitch returned his attention to the pad with a heavy sigh. Dex lifted those golden eyes to him, his brows darting.
“I’m real fucked up, guy,” he said softly, running a hand over Dex’s head, stopping to scratch his neck. The dog’s eyes grew heavy. “That’s just no good. I gotta get my shit together.”
The shower shut off and Mitch’s jaw tightened, remembering the way she’d slid up against him in front of the hotel. He focused on the paper beneath his pencil. Circles and arrows that were adding up to a lot of holes he still needed to fill.
The bathroom door opened. Dex lifted his head and twisted to look at Halina the same time Mitch did. She was wearing a white hotel robe, her hair towel dried, tousled, and raven-black. Her skin had picked up some color in the heat of the shower, her cheeks glowing. Mitch’s whole body tightened so hard, he swallowed a moan and looked away.
“Feel better?” he asked.
“Not really. I think my head’s going to explode.”
She came toward him and his tension ratcheted up.
“What are you doing?” she asked, standing by the bed. Naked beneath that robe. One pull of the tie and she would be his. His to touch. To taste. To take.
Refocus. “Writing down the things I know, adding in what you’ve told me, trying to piece it together.”
She sat on the bed and reached out to pet Dex. The dog put his head back down with a heavy sigh of contentment.
“Try to get some sleep,” he said, hoping she’d take the hint and get out of reach.
Her hand stopped moving over Dex’s fur and lay right next to Mitch’s thigh. “I’m exhausted, but can’t turn my brain off.”
He wanted do things to her that would make her brain stop working altogether. Guaranteed.
His cell rang. He blew out a breath of frustration and rolled toward Halina, sliding his phone from his back pocket. She smelled of flowers and spice and made him think about licking her . . . everywhere.
His phone display read GI JOE and killed his sexual fantasy. He swung his legs off the bed, pushing to his feet and crossing the room so Halina wouldn’t overhear his conversation with Owen.
A former ally to Schaeffer, Colonel Owen Young had switched sides when the team uncovered Schaeffer’s blatant attempt to use Owen as a scapegoat. He’d aided the team’s escape to safety during a recent confrontation gone wrong, ending in the car accident that had put Schaeffer in a coma. Mitch knew Owen wasn’t in this for purely altruistic reasons, but neither was Mitch.
Working for DARPA as a department head gave Owen connections and access to information the team couldn’t get, even with all the high-level, inside contacts the team had. That’s why Mitch had called in a request for deeper information on Halina while he’d been in the storage unit and she’d been sleeping.
But Owen was also still working for Schaeffer in an off-the-record capacity, which made Mitch think hard about everything Owen said and did, even though the man had never yet crossed the team. Owen’s boss had loaned him to Schaeffer for some undisclosed research supposedly related to his work with the Armed Forces Committee, when he’d really planned on using Owen the same way Mitch and the team were using him now.
The real difference—which Owen was well aware of—was that Mitch and the team wouldn’t fuck him upside down and backward the way Schaeffer would in a heartbeat.
“Yeah,” Mitch answered his phone.
“You’ll want to rethink using Beloi as your key witness against Schaeffer.”
Fuck. Mitch’s stomach tightened in preparation. He dropped his head and rubbed his temples. “Well, good morning to you too.”
“The Beloi family,” Owen continued, “is one of the families on our watch list. They’re former KGB members who were cut when the regime switched over after the Cold War.
“A lot of those guys went bad, started running every type of criminal ring you could imagine—money laundering, protection rackets, drugs, weapons, security for big criminals, even contract killings. Some of the better ones went on to become double agents. The Belois were of the darker persuasion and unique in that they made the spy business—even after it went south—their family business.
“Halina’s not included per se, but her extended family, the people who raised her from the age of nine after her parents were killed, are. Everyone listed on the watch is male. She is mentioned in the dossier, but only as the female orphan of parents taken out as revenge for a prior assassination the father executed.”
Mitch closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to the lids. “Does she know all this?”
“Doesn’t look like it. In fact it looks like the pattern throughout the family was to keep the females out of it. Something about the culture. Must be why she was never a focus. Still, her history would be twisted by a talented defense attorney.”
“I know. I am that defense attorney.”
“Good to know you don’t suffer from any self-esteem problems.”
“And you do?” he asked.
Owen ignored his rhetorical question. “But she’s a smart woman. Which means she was a smart kid. And I can tell you from experience, kids know one hell of a lot more about what’s going on in a family than adults give them credit for. My kids knew my ex and I should have gotten a divorce long before we figured it out.”
At least what Halina had told him about her parents dying and how she’d been raised by her extended family had been true. That eased a sliver of his heart. “What else?”
“The husband bit looks like bullshit.”
Owen’s words bounced right off Mitch’s skull. He grabbed them back. “Wait. What?”
“From what I can find, the Saveli Sintrovsky who worked as an ambassador seven years ago is a second cousin to the Beloi family and lives in Moscow, five hundred miles from Saratov.”
She married her cousin? That was Mitch’s first crazy thought. He rubbed his eyes and opened his ears for the real information.
“He’s kept himself very removed from the Beloi clan for good reason,” Owen continued. “He’d never hold on to his job in government if he associated with them. He was taking a big chance posing for Beloi in Washington. Risked his twenty-year career. Whatever the reason, it must have been important.
“He’s also never been married. Neither has Halina Beloi. Or Halina Sintrovsky. Or Halina Dubrovsky. Or Heather Raiden.”